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While that kind of item-based back-and-forth isn’t new to Mario Kart, it feels like it has been taken to a new extreme by World‘s more crowded race track. If you’re in the middle of the pack, every tranche of item boxes you pass can lead, in short order, to a flurry of near-unavoidable projectiles and item-enhanced opponents cluttering your immediate space. That’s especially true in online races, where human opponents tend to be much more ruthless with their item use than even the hardest computer-controlled opponents.

The change ultimately rewards defensive driving, where you do your best to avoid other racers and utilize protective items until you have a chance to rocket into the relative safety of the top few positions. Sometimes, though, there’s simply no avoiding a maddening series of bad breaks that can literally send you from first place to 19th in an instant.

It’s not the destination, it’s the journey

Once you’ve adjusted to the more crowded field of racers, you’ll then have to get used to the odd structure of Mario Kart World‘s main racing modes. Rather than racing multiple laps around the game’s well-designed tracks, you’ll spend the bulk of your race time in most racing modes trekking between those tracks across the great expanses of Mario Kart World‘s, uh, world.

These inter-course interludes offer a decent variety to the structure, which will see you traveling through desert wastelands, down traffic-clogged highways, along the surface of tiered waterfalls, across frozen tundra, and more. What’s unavoidably similar about most of them, though, is their unbearable straightness. Players used to the undulating, crisscrossing curves of a standard Mario Kart course will marvel at just how rarely they have to powerslide around turns while shuttling between those courses in World.

These long straightaways aren’t boring, per se. The designers have done their best to dress them up with plenty of obstacles (of the stationary, vehicular, and livestock varieties), as well as jumps, dash pads, and frequent item boxes to make sure you’re still paying attention. But it can still be a jarring transition to go from two or three minutes across one of these mostly straight interregnums into the usual twisty wildness of the game’s more familiar pre-designed courses.